


Timekeeper

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/F, I Don't Even Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 21:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6824230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is from some while ago, and I am still quite frankly unsure what it is—a fairy tale? A fable? Something slightly less, or other, than either of those? Let’s just say that I thought the word “timekeeper,” and this is what happened after that. The story begins, “Once, in an eddy of a history that might be yours or mine, there lived a timekeeper...”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Timekeeper

Once, in an eddy of a history that might be yours or mine, there lived a timekeeper. As timekeepers do, she made and sold pieces of time, such pieces as might be fixed with a chain, nestled in a vest pocket, or set upon a mantel such as yours or mine; and, as timekeepers do, she kept and saved time itself for herself.

The timekeeper was beautiful. She had always been the most beautiful girl in the seaside village, the most desired of creatures, with eyes and hair of darkest black. Her hair was still as black as night itself, although of course a timekeeper’s nights are not like yours or mine: night is the time she keeps, the time she saves.

The timekeeper lived alone, as timekeepers do; she seemed to share regularly the company of no other creatures, save a turtle she called Clepsydra, whom she visited by the sea every day, rain or shine, or perhaps it was Clepsydra who visited her, for a sea turtle is no housepet such as your dog or my cat.

She lived long, the timekeeper, as timekeepers do. She lived long, and she waited for the one who would become her apprentice. And in time, a shorter time than she had expected, a mother and a father brought their daughter to her. “She wishes to apprentice herself to you,” said the mother, gesturing to her very young daughter.

The timekeeper resisted, saying “I do not need so young an apprentice. It is not for a child to decide to keep time.”

The girl’s mother said, “We know that your life will linger and last, as life does for timekeepers. We wish this for our daughter, and more importantly, she wishes it for herself. She gazes upon your clockworks and desires nothing more than to know their secrets.”

The timekeeper looked at the girl, saw quickness in her eyes. And yet a timekeeper’s life is long; a timekeeper’s world is slow. It ticks with inevitability, but each tick is heard for and of itself. Each tick echoes.

“Do you understand what it means to become my apprentice?” the timekeeper asked the girl.

The girl nodded. “It means I shall leave my family and live with you. It means I shall be yours. I shall belong to you, and I shall belong to time.”

The timekeeper appealed once more to the girl’s parents. They raised their hands as if to say, “We have done all we can.”

And so the timekeeper had an apprentice.

She began by teaching her apprentice the vocabulary of time: verge, escapement, flirt, pivot, arbor.

“Arbor!” the girl exclaimed. “That is where trees grow!”

“An arbor is something like a tree,” the timekeeper explained. “It is an axle. It holds a spindle, a wheel. It helps time turn.”

The girl turned enormous green eyes to her. “I will learn it all. Arbors of a single tree. Escapements that can never escape. I will learn it all.”

“So you shall,” the timekeeper assured her. “But there is one thing in particular you must understand.”

It was time for bed. The timekeeper set her own clockwork, the one that was given to her by own master. She had made small adjustments, but it was a clockwork of old.

“You will feel a great pause,” the timekeeper said. “You will feel a great pause, then you will hear a chime, and morning will have come.”

“Is that not sleep?” the apprentice asked.

“It is not sleep,” said the timekeeper. “It is a pause. It is how we timekeepers keep time.”

****

The timekeeper took the apprentice to the sea, to visit Clepsydra.

The apprentice watched Clepsydra emerge gradually from the water, as if the tide were receding solely to reveal the turtle to the world.

“She is very old,” the timekeeper told the apprentice.

“Does she feel the great pause as we do?” the apprentice asked.

The timekeeper at first shook her head. But then: “I do not know,” she said. “Perhaps she is herself a great pause.”

****

One evening as the timekeeper and the apprentice dined, the apprentice said, with the seriousness that only the young can muster, “I love you very much.”

“Thank you,” the timekeeper said gravely. “I am fond of you as well.”

“Then we must be married,” the apprentice said. She nodded, as if the matter were now settled, the bride-price paid.

The timekeeper laughed. “You are but a child,” she said.

“Someday I will no longer be a child. What will you say then?”

“Then, I will be old.”

The apprentice regarded the timekeeper through eyes of growing green. The timekeeper looked at the apprentice through eyes of timeless black. “Very well,” said the apprentice.

As happens with the young, as happened with you and me, or with yours and mine, the apprentice grew. Despite the great pause each night, she grew strong and tall, and taller still, though she was still so young.

The apprentice, who had always said very little on the whole, now said even less, instead applying herself diligently to the making, the connecting, of bezels, armatures, pallets, pinions. Her hands were precise, quick; her mind more so, and then even more. The clockworks in which she had a hand were strong, reliable, correct.

But the timekeeper would feel, of a morning as they worked, the apprentice’s eyes upon her; the timekeeper would feel tension in her own fingers, not in the balance spring where it should be, and she would feel, instead of the strong beat of her heart showing her how to mark the countwheel, a stutter-break, a thump of heat that might melt an arbor, an arbor that should be strong, and standing, and impervious.

The timekeeper went to the sea now without the apprentice. She went to the sea and stood in the wind, touched the drip and cold and gleam of rocks, watched Clepsydra appear as if from rock herself. “If you could speak,” the timekeeper said.

Clepsydra blinked eyes far older than the timekeeper’s. Clepsydra dropped her wrinkled head, swung it as a pendulum.

The timekeeper thought carefully of the apprentice, carefully so as to sidestep the green of her eyes, the red of her mouth. The apprentice would soon be as skilled as the timekeeper herself had been when her own master gave all his time back. She determined that she would begin to spend time, to increase the distance between herself and the apprentice, to ensure that there would be no confusion in the clockworks.

And from then on, the timekeeper retired to another room at night; the timekeeper set the ancient clockwork for the apprentice alone. The timekeeper learned to sleep. Time was kept and saved for the apprentice now. “This is how it must be,” the timekeeper told herself. In fewer months than she expected, she saw that the black of her hair was no longer as the darkest of nights. It was as a night when comets leave trails: one here, one there, now two, now more, as on your head or mine, or perhaps your father’s or my mother’s.

The apprentice said nothing about this new arrangement. But the timekeeper would feel, of a morning when they worked, the apprentice’s eyes upon her. And tension, and a stutter-break.

****

The summer was high, the night was hot. The timekeeper went to her room, her room alone, and lay upon her cot, waiting for sleep to come. Sleep was a pause of sorts, but not grand; no, it was a troubled lingering, an intermission of dreams free to come and go. The timekeeper did not welcome sleep, when it came. When sleep came, the timekeeper endured it.

That night, she waited; whether impatiently or patiently, one could not say. She waited, and she thought, when she heard her door open, that she must have missed sleep’s arrival, that this must be a dream, for before her, in the moonlight and the warmth and the depth of restless perplexity, stood the apprentice.

And as if a click had slipped from its ratchet, the timekeeper could feel, somewhere in her, a mainspring unwinding. Her body rose toward the apprentice. The apprentice smiled... for surely anyone would smile to see such beauty as the timekeeper’s, and further to see such beauty in such light, and further still to see such beauty so moved in such light.

The apprentice wore a cloak about her shoulders. “It is too warm for a cloak,” the timekeeper said, and her intent in saying that? That determination can be neither yours nor mine.

“It will not always be too warm for a cloak,” said the apprentice. “But then it will be too warm again. You will see.”

“What will I see?” the timekeeper asked.

“First, this,” the apprentice said. She let the cloak slip to the ground, and the timekeeper saw that she held a clockwork, a clockwork of somewhat familiar feature, a clockwork very like the one that now lived in the room where only the apprentice slept.

The clockwork had been wound; the timekeeper now heard its ticks.

The apprentice stepped over the cloak. She set the clockwork next to the timekeeper’s cot. She leaned to the timekeeper and pressed her mouth briefly to the timekeeper’s cheek. Then she stood, away from the timekeeper, and pushed the hammer on the clockwork.

Metal slid against metal; it should have rasped, but in the quiet, heavy room, it roared. 

“What have you done?” the timekeeper gasped. She felt the grand pause begin, but it felt greater even than grand, a pause that might last far longer than a night such as yours or mine, even the longest of nights on which we outsleep the sun’s rise and face guilting for our sloth.

The timekeeper tried to grasp up the clockwork, but it was not that same one, not that one of old at all. It was strange in her hand, strange and heavy and slipping from her hand. “What have you done?” she tried to say again.

“I have made a new clockwork,” the apprentice said. “When the flirt releases the chime, you will understand why.”

The timekeeper did not know what happened in the next moment. Or the next. Or in what might have been only one more next, or the vastest of stretches, an aleph of nexts, for the pause was ever only a pause, a breath, a beginning and then a chime of an end.

When the chime sounded, the timekeeper started. She was as she was, but the air around her was different, colder. She stood and her body protested; she remembered: I allowed this to happen.

The apprentice’s cloak lay before her, still, on the floorboards.

A note fluttered from a nail on the door. “Come to the sea,” it said.

And so the timekeeper, for want of anything more sensical to do, went to the sea.

A beautiful, long-limbed, green-eyed woman stood among the rocks. Her hair blew wild in the coldness of a winter wind. She wore a cloak very different from the one that had lain on the floor of the timekeeper’s bedroom, the one that now shielded the timekeeper’s shoulders, the one that the timekeeper pulled close around her, as if for shelter, to protect herself from green eyes, from long limbs, from beauty.

Clepsydra was beside the woman; Clepsydra raised her head as the timekeeper came near.

The timekeeper regarded them both. “I imagine it has been some time,” she said.

Both creatures moved their heads in response. Only one uttered an audible laugh. “But you have caught up,” said the apprentice, whose hair now showed its own streaks of comets’ tails.

“Why did you do this?” asked the timekeeper, although she knew perfectly well. She looked to Clepsydra, who slung her head in pendulum fashion. Her eyes had always been far more dark than those of the timekeeper.

“For love,” said the apprentice. But she was no longer an apprentice, of course. She was now, had become, a timekeeper herself.

“I loved you before,” the timekeeper said. “It was wrong.”

The former apprentice laughed and came to the timekeeper, stood close, breathed upon her. “Not wrong, my love,” she said. “Untimely.”

Said the timekeeper, “You are beautiful. You were before, but over time... you have become that much more beautiful. You could spend time with anyone.”

“I told you long, long ago that we would be married,” the former apprentice said. “You did not believe it then. But this is what time is for.”

“And what is that?” the timekeeper asked. She again looked to Clepsydra, who had seen so much.

Clepsydra blinked at the timekeeper, then turned to the sea. She moved deliberately, with purpose, to her home.

The former apprentice took the timekeeper in her arms. “To bring us together.” She lowered her lips to the timekeeper’s, and the timekeeper could not help but rise ecstatically to meet her. “This time is ours now, and we will share it.”

“But you are the timekeeper now. What am I to do?”

“As I said: we will share our time.” The former apprentice smiled and kissed the timekeeper again, then smiled again and kissed her yet once more. “The clockworks we will make together,” she sighed, “will be the envy of all. As will we, we and our surpassing joy.”

Think of those clockworks, those made by the timekeeper and her former apprentice, made by two timekeepers, two timekeepers with darkest hair streaked with comets’ tails. Do you have one? Does your family? If you do, you are blessed, and you surely know it. The time those pieces keep is of an arbor in a fruitful fall, a flirt that always ends in happy fruition. The time of which they tell is that of perpetual reunion, of concomitance in despite of misalignment. Of reunion in despite of all time that would deny it.

And in the end, perhaps no tick can truly shout of love, perhaps no alarm can ring of tender passion—no tick, that is, of your heart or mine, no ringing murmur that wakes us from our prosaic slumber. For of course, we are not timekeepers, you and I.

Or are we?

END

**Author's Note:**

> slightly edited original Tumblr tags: seriously I just thought the word 'timekeeper' and there this was, it is kind of 'The Door into Summer'-y, and I tried to de-squick that situation a little, but there's only so far you can de-squick it, but anyway, sometimes timelines do not line up, and the apprentice knows that you should fix that if you can, and while the timekeeper is a genius no matter the universe, she is also sometimes not very smart, and that is one reason why they belong together


End file.
